Napster, the famous music-sharing program, is not sharing as much music as it formerly did because of legal actions by the Recording Industry Association of America, the band Metallica, and other recording artists. Music companies send song titles to Napster, and Napster blocks the banned songs from its central database. Then Napster users put banned songs online anyway by misspelling the song titles or spelling titles using pig Latin.

Despite the clever misspellings and coded titles, Napster users are sharing about 60 percent fewer music files since the court-ordered screening went into effect, according to Massachusetts-based Webnoize. The biggest current hits are the most likely to be blocked. This seems to be as the recording industry intended - if the hits aren't available, many people won't stick around to scrounge for other music. Are the days of downloading music from the web over for regular non-technical Internet users?

Many Napster users say that they would pay up to $20 a month to keep this service alive, according to a poll of PC Magazine readers. Exactly how many people will pay is unknown, but the numbers are expected to be high. When ethical issues no longer besiege the Napster service, many more people who are on the fence will likely join Napster. There is a market for buying songs at a low price via the Internet, and eventually someone will take advantage of it.

But will services like Napster reduce the profits of the recording industry and of artists?

Anyone who has used Napster knows that tracking down all the good songs from your favourite artists is more trouble than it is worth. Most people use Napster for the occasional hard-to-find song, or to listen to a favourite song on their computer or see if they like a particular musician, but they still buy CDs. Why would this change? Napster hurts CD sales only in situations where a one-hit wonder has a CD full of other songs that nobody wants.

All the recording labels allow FM and AM radio to broadcast their songs for a fee; why not use Napster in a similar scenario? They could monitor which songs are being downloaded for the purposes of royalty payments to the artists and record companies. The royalty payments would come from the subscription revenue. Napster has suggested $5 a month subscription fee to use its MP3 searching software.

Nielsen/NetRatings estimates that there are 160 million Internet users in the US alone. If 50 million of these Internet users each paid $10 a month, or $120 a year, for unlimited access to Napster, the service would gross $6 billion annually. The $6 billion a year would be right off the top and amount to almost pure profits, because the cost of distribution is nil. Most of this money would be redistributed to the artists and labels. The record companies and artists actually might make more money from this source than from conventional CDs. Adding special international servers and more specialised music indexes would also make a subscription model more appealing. Napster could become the dominant, world-wide music distribution source.

Unfortunately only a few companies, such as Bertelsmann, see the possibilities. This situation is like a gold prospector stumbling onto a rich diamond mine, then closing it because it doesn't contain any gold.

However, I've always thought of Napster as a search engine first and a download service second. My earliest experience of the MP3 file sharing service was when I was looking for an obscure piece of music for a friend, a schoolteacher who just wanted the lyrics of the song to use in class.

First, I tried searching every which way I knew, on search engines big and small. I found a few passing references to the song, but no lyrics, even from the various search sites devoted to song lyrics. Then I thought of checking the major CD outlets like Amazon and CDNow, to see if I could find an actual recording. Better luck there: using their search engines, I was able to find an oldies collection that included the song, but it would take a couple of weeks to get a copy. Then I remembered Napster. Someone had told me about how you could find nearly any song, somewhere out there on computers running Napster software, if you just logged on the servers at the right time. I downloaded a copy of Macster, the Napster client for my Macintosh, and went to work.

To make a long story short, it worked. It took me several sessions spread over three days to finally track down the elusive song, but I was thrilled when Napster finally succeeded, after all of the power of the standard search engines had failed. Ever since then, I've taken delight in hunting down obscurities using Napster.

Napster has inspired a legion of imitators and followers. While none of them has quite the magic and reach of Napster yet, there are some promising alternatives that are worth a try.

Web sites that search for music: MediaSearch: www.mediasearch.com This search site covers all manner of media file types. In addition to MP3s, you can search for MIDI and other types of music files, plus various formats of video and images. The intuitive interface makes searching easy.

AltaVista MP3/Audio: www.altavista.com/sites/search/saudio AltaVista provides helpful Lycos Music: http://music.lycos.com Lycos presents links to extra material with its results, such as artist bios, and lyrics.

Audiofind: http://audiofind.com This is a best bet amongst the MP3-only search sites. It's quick, it's tidy, it's reliable enough, and it gets results including lots of the off-the-beaten-path choices. You can search or browse by artist or, song title.

Other Napster-like peer-to peer search software AudioGnome: www.audiognome.com AudioGnome is client software for a Napster clone technology called OpenNap. It works just like Napster in most respects. The real difference is that it's accessing a whole other independent set of servers, rather than the Napster central servers that are under attack by the record industry.

Gnutella:www.gnutella.wego.com Like Napster, Gnutella a software program that allows users to share MP3 files with others over the Internet. Unlike Napster, Gnutella users don't connect through a central server but directly with each other. This means it is practically impossible to block anyone from using it. Because there is no central server to search, Gnutella searches are much slower and less reliable than Napster's search are.

Gnutella goes beyond Napster because it lets users to share any type of file, not just MP3's. To use Gnutella, you need one of the many client software packages designed to use the Gnutella protocol. There are links on Gnutella's homepage to clients you can download to access computer servers running Gnutella.

Beyond Music While the legal fight between Napster and the recording industry has occupied the attention of the media, the idea behind Napster has been expanding quietly into other industries. This powerful underlying technology has spawned dozens of Napster-like programs, including Bearshare, Gnutella, and Aimster.

All of these programs allow people to share and exchange data at a one-to-one or one-to-many level. "Napster-like technology has the potential to cause wholesale changes in marketing strategies, and entire industries", says author and marketing consultant Ben McConnell. Using Napster-like technology, customers can try products before they buy them. And it is not just limited to listening to music.

In March the Ennex manufacturing company of Los Angeles launched a relatively low-cost fabrication machine that uses open-standard digital files to create manufactured products. These digital files can be shared using Napster-like programs. For instance, someone could get a copy of a digital file of a Barbie doll and then edit the file using a 3-D program to design a new doll, and send it to a fabricator for production.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is publishing its entire curriculum - including lecture notes, assignments, sample problems and reading lists for 500 courses - on the Internet within the next two years. No passwords. No monthly subscription. Free. The marketing strategy is to present the value of intellectual capital as an up-front offering; the university calculates that its return will be students who want to attend MIT for the "experience" of interacting with top-notch students and researchers.

Mr McConnell points out that "Developing products around a standard can be very lucrative. The widespread adoption of the open-source Linux operating system has shown that making intellectual capital easily available - or more conveniently, Napsterised - goes a long way toward creating a standard.

"The record companies, which have bitterly opposed the idea of any distribution system other than their own, will likely reap millions of dollars in revenues by embracing an electronic distribution standard caused by the introduction of Napster", concluded Mr. McConnell in his article "Napsterise your knowledge".

Before Napster came along, online recordings were already being distributed over the Internet, as they still are up for grabs on the web sites listed in this article, and the Napster technology will continue to help people easily share other types of files via the Internet, regardless of the outcome of the court case.